Vinyl control over Live Clip Playback

taylortronic · Post by **taylortronic** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 8:18 pm

what's up, LiveHeads? okay, i'll get straight to this... i'm looking for a way to control Live clip playback with vinyl.

my project involves improvising a lot of sounbite material that needs real-time processing in Live. the DJ needs to be able to control the same clips with his turntables. in other words, i want to be able to apply Live tricks like follow actions, pitch changes and other on the fly parameter adjustments to both the samples that i'm controlling with my keyboard as well as the samples that the DJ is working.

i am planning on trying to accomplish this with one laptop which i hope will simplify things. i know that many turntable control systems have software that time stretches to incoming MIDI tempo, but if my samples are pitched differently than his...

my DJ has turntablism skills that don't include harmonic theory and mixing/matching keys and modes. i'm not mad at him or other DJ's who have never had to do this, but it means i'm going to have to control pitch functions (at least) for him.

can i use, like, torq or something to actually control clip playback with turntables similar to having a midi controller device?

thanks,
taylortronic

xfx · Post by **xfx** » Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:58 pm

well, torq won't do you any good here 'cause re-wire ableton <-> torq sync only works in auto mode. that is exactly what nobody needs

.
i'd be careful with torq anyway. i bought and returned it within 24 hours. nothing beats serato in terms of stability and user interface! but yeah - a link between ableton and vinyl style control would be nice...

John Sweet · Post by **John Sweet** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 12:33 am

Get the Miss Pinky Pluggo. It's a VST, and M-Audio bought rights to it for the guts of Torq so it's the same difference anyway.

xfx · Post by **xfx** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 11:32 am

hey john!

this is interesting news. i was really looking for something to control clips in ableton the good old analog way. warping just drives me nuts

. so just with pluggo as vst and ms pinky vinyl i could do this? than i would not need any torq software to begin with, right?

KU · Post by KU » Thu Nov 16, 2006 3:56 pm

thats right

$99 bucks gets you the 4 ms.pinky vinyls (which also work in torq) and you get the pinky pluggo VST. It works very nicely.

the only drawback is that you cannot just drop audio files from the Live browser onto the pinky pluggo, you have to drop it from an explorer window.

taylortronic · Post by **taylortronic** » Sat Nov 18, 2006 10:17 pm

okay, so with the ms. pinky plug-in (this is a PLUG-IN?) i can control live clips with a technics 1200?

John Sweet · Post by **John Sweet** » Sat Nov 18, 2006 10:57 pm

No, you actually put the Pinky Pluggo into a MIDI track I think, and it works as an instrument playing its own clips.

If you wanted to control Live clip playback by vinyl, Ms Pinky would probably still be a good choice, but you'd need to write something in Max to change the Pinky control messages into CCs that would talk to Live.

Ms Pinky would make yr turntable behave like one big sensitive encoder, & you'd have to write a Max patch to make that useful in Live's rather limited scrub/nudge clip system. Skipping all that & just using the plugin seems like a lot more fun.

xfx · Post by **xfx** » Thu Nov 30, 2006 3:22 pm

OK, i got myself ms pinky and played around with it for an hour or 2. i'm sorry to say - but it sucks

. how on earth are you gonna use this in an on-stage situation??? the interface is designed so badly that you can't recognize anything (and that's only the visual part). selecting files from browser window is just horrible. the beauty of other apps like serato or final scratch is that you can bring order in your collection and have easy and quick access to your music. my tracks usually don't play longer then 2 minutes alone so with this i'd go nuts trying to find the next track...
to make a long story short - forget about controlling ableton with vinyl! if you want to make use of effects you need to re-route audio the good old analog way (at least for now). i'd love to see serato to have re-wire capability. this is still the best digital dj application on the market.
i'll do some more testing with routing sound from serato to ableton on _one_ laptop over the weekend. with the newer machines that should not be too hard to handle...
so, anybody interested in buying my brand new ms pinky system?

m.nash · Post by **m.nash** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 6:57 pm

I purchased Torq with mspinky vinyls for this especially. haven't tried pluggo. can't expect too much from an opensource indie project. just as long as it works.

Because m-audio distributes Ableton, and is already looking to integrate the features, I can see this happening in the near future.

However, if you're interested lets exercise our consumer democratic rights and request this feature from them directly.

http://www.torq-dj.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=58

is the official forum, and wishlist topic concerning this. Please if you are interested in this magnificent feature, POST!!!

pucklermuskau · Post by **pucklermuskau** » Wed Dec 13, 2006 9:25 pm

with the caveat that i use pinky exclusively for adding scratch/sample dropping, rather than whole track playback, i can suggest taking your <2min tracks, and stringing them together into a 15min track in the arrangement window, then loading that new track into pinky, which produces something akin to a customized classic scratch sample record. You can then needle drop around for the bits you need at any one point. A little cludgy, i agree. It would be lovely for pinky to send some manner of cc message for true clip control, but that still leaves the problem of abletons limited clip nudge control. Oh, wont someone think of the turntablists!

m.nash · Post by **m.nash** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 7:31 am

pucklermuskau wrote:Oh, wont someone think of the turntablists!

LoL

Nice tips btw. But these work arounds are def a nuissance. I'm sure this is on the agenda, in you we trust Ableton!

Vinyl control over Live Clip Playback

Vinyl control over Live Clip Playback

am i dreaming?